Getting scared out of your wits is so amusing

LAUREL WELLMAN

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, October 23, 2002

NOBODY COULD ARGUE that Halloween is an under-marketed holiday; the "seasonal" aisle at the local drugstore seems to have been crammed with plastic jack-o'-lanterns, face painting kits and jumbo bags of miniature Snickers bars for several months now.

Still, to the inventive mind, there's always room left for more; Halloween is also the basis for an entire industry built around the very American appetites for amusement parks and for being scared witless.

"The haunted attraction business, as it's called, is very big in this country," explained Jeff Brown. He's been producing his own haunted attraction,

If we might single out one peculiarity of human behavior, it's that people will pay cash to have stuff jump out at them. Nightmare University, located in the parking lot of the Northgate Mall near Macy's, is all about giving them their money's worth.

"Persons who are pregnant, or have heart or other medical conditions, should not enroll in Nightmare University," warns a sign on the front of the large marquee housing the attraction, and some teenage girls in line giggled nervously as they read it.

THERE AREN'T MANY haunted attractions in the Bay Area, a gap in the market that Brown found encouraging. "In some markets there are 30 or 40," he said. "Detroit is a very big market. St. Louis. Dallas-Fort Worth is a huge market."

Indeed, the haunting industry now features conventions, at which the difficulties of constructing mechanisms to make ghosts swoop down on patrons' heads are discussed, and "haunters" -- as the developers of haunted attractions refer to themselves -- can purchase prefab props such as -- well, one hesitates even to speculate.

There are also trade publications, like Haunted Attraction magazine, Fright Times and Hauntworld, whose Web site has a classified section offering such items as a freestanding 12,000-square-foot maze -- complete with haunted mansion facade -- and, albeit with slight damage to its teeth, one of the queen aliens from "Aliens" ($8,000 OBO).

IN THE MIDST of subcultures, we are standing in a Marin parking lot. Then again, this might be an example of a genuinely homegrown art form finding its audience: Brown, who started out decorating his own house -- complete with "graves" in the front yard ("It was kind of an excuse not to cut the lawn") -- soon had 300 people showing up for the tour.

"It's a hobby gone wrong, is what it is," he said.

Still, Nightmare University is pretty much a PG-rated deal; Brown explained that he relies on "startles, scares and the unexpected." In other words: stuff that jumps out at you.

"We're not gory," he said. "We're not graphic. There's no rooms spattered with blood."

"Why not, man?" demanded one of the teenage boys in line behind me.

Once we'd been allowed inside -- by lab-coated attendants, one of whom was wearing fake pointed teeth -- we learned the premise of Nightmare University: Professor Phineas Time, fired from a Midwestern university on account of his "unorthodox teaching practices," decided to head west and build his own university right here in San Rafael. He died just months before it was to open in 1945, and to this day, neighbors of the decaying campus swear they . . . see things.

Scared yet? The teenage boys were chortling; the word "dude" was heard frequently.

The tour began. Stuff jumped out at us: "Dude!" Strobe lights flashed; eerie noises played on the sound system: "Dude!" We were pursued by a silent, black-robed figure: "Duuuude!"

In other words, they enjoyed themselves thoroughly. "That was so cool," said Joe Miesch, 18.